A Parser and a Software Visualization Environment to Support the Comprehension of MATLAB/Octave Programs

摘要

Software comprehension and analysis of MATLAB and Octave programs are not trivial tasks. Programmers have to devote considerable effort to obtain relevant data from source code and related artifacts. Tools that provide support for software comprehension activities usually rely on parsers to obtain data from source code. The problem in the MATLAB/Octave case is the limited number of available parsers and the difficult to build an extensible solution with them. In this paper, we describe the development of a parser that converts MATLAB and Octave program codes into instances of the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM), which can subsequently undergo static analyses to feed different visual representations. The goal of these representations is to support software comprehension. We describe our experience in the use of this parser to build a software visualization environment to support the comprehension of MATLAB and Octave programs.